Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 195

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Do Not Belong (Clint Smith, The Atlantic): “The privileged poor are students who come from low-income backgrounds but attended wealthy private high schools, giving them a level of familiarity with and access to the social and cultural capital that tend to make people successful at elite universities. The doubly disadvantaged are students who arrive at these top institutions from neighborhood public schools, many of which are overcrowded and underfunded. They are schools where these students have excelled, but that are ill-equipped to give them the sociocultural tools necessary to understand the nuances of how these elite colleges operate.”

Related: The Scandals of Meritocracy (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The ‘more meritocracy’ argument against both legacies and racial quotas implicitly assumes that aptitude — some elixir of I.Q. and work ethic — is what our elite primarily lacks. But is that really our upper class’s problem?”

Evangelicals Show No Decline, Despite Trump and Nones (Ryan Burge, Christianity Today): “The fact that evangelicals’ share of the population remains relatively stable over the last decade is striking given the continued rise of the nones. Evangelicals have been able to replace losses as fast as they are occurring, at least for now.”

Why The Bible Ain’t Woke (Toby Sumpter, personal blog): “…it is simply not enough to note that Jonathan Edwards, the puritans, or the founders of Southern Seminary owned slaves. Far more work must be done to demonstrate that these men sinned in their treatment of their slaves. And furthermore, even where sin can be clearly demonstrated, there must be a bright and shining light of demarcation between disqualifying sin and the endemic sins of the human race.” He has undeniably interesting things to say, but read his article in conjunction with the content from Peter Williams and Glenn Miller I shared back in volume 76.

The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center (Bob Moser, New Yorker): “For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.”

The need for intellectual diversity in psychological science: Our own studies of actively open-minded thinking as a case study (Stanovich and Toplak, Cognition): “it is important that psychology maintain its credibility as a neutral arbiter—a credibility that has been vastly eroded in recent years by empirical evidence of the ideological bias in our science (Ceci and Williams, 2018, Crawford and Jussim, 2018, Duarte et al., 2015). There is a need for greater intellectual diversity in all areas of psychology, but particularly in those that interface with politics and sociocultural beliefs. Greater intellectual diversity in our own lab years ago might have prevented us from continuing to use items in our AOT scale that inflated negative correlations with religiosity.”

tl;dr — researchers realized that a well-known psychological tool they developed years ago was biased against religious believers, and they concluded this probably happened because their lab was “overwhelmingly secular.” They humbly repented and wrote a paper about their mistake. Kudos to them.

Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method, Prizewinning Physicist Says (Lee Billings, Scientific American): “I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief.” This is from an interview with Marcelo Gleiser, Dartmouth physics prof. Recommended by a student.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Sadly, I got nothing this week. In lieu of awesome links, here’s a mediocre joke: “What’s the best thing to put in a cookie? Your teeth!”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have On Political Correctness (William Deresiewicz, The American Scholar): a long and thoughtful article. “Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion…. I say this, by the way, as an atheist, a democratic socialist, a native northeasterner, a person who believes that colleges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvious by now, a card-carrying member of the liberal elite.” (first shared in volume 92)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar produced shrewd warriors “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a similar way, we need to become wise people whose faith interacts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may continue the tradition of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a partisan organization. To paraphrase another minister: we are not about the donkey’s agenda and we are not about the elephant’s agenda — we are about the Lamb’s agenda. Having said that, I read widely (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ideological Turing test and in part because I do not believe I can fairly say “I agree” or “I disagree” until I can say “I understand”) and may at times share articles that have a strong partisan bias simply because I find the article stimulating. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with everything an author says in an article I mention, much less things the author has said in other articles (although if I strongly disagree with something in the article I’ll usually mention it). And to the extent you can discern my opinions, please understand that they are my own and not necessarily those of Chi Alpha or any other organization I may be perceived to represent.

Also, remember that I’m not reporting news — I’m giving you a selection of things I found interesting. There’s a lot happening in the world that’s not making an appearance here because I haven’t found stimulating articles written about it.

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